Archive for the ‘1.Rhapsody’ Category
Posted on March 26, 2013 - by Khaled
… On being successful
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Success is the sweetest thing for winners!
In my opinion, and most importantly to be successful you must be confident. And to be confident you must know yourself, commit yourself and be genuine! Of course dreaming and trying to achieve your dreams is crucial to prevent your self from full satisfaction and keep yearning for bigger successes.
The most dangerous obstacle in the face of your success is the belief that your success depends on luck! Indeed, believing in luck focuses your mindset on a fictional concept that neither you nor anybody else can alter or affect! What’s even worse is that you will allow yourself to consider luck as an excuse to explain and justify your failure (just bad luck). This is more dangerous as it undervalues your successes ( just good luck) which may alter your self-esteem.
But how can you assess your own success? I stumbled on this quiz few years ago and I am not sure of its initiator but I find it very helpful to measure one’s success in life despite that Success itself has no clear and single definition. I created a spreadsheet and I try to answer this quiz’s questions with marks between 0 and 10. I always revisit this spreadsheet every few month to evaluate and have an estimation of “the evolution of my success“.
This has become a ritual over the years and helped me to reach a satisfying state of general well-being and ambition to achieve more.
The quiz consists of the following questions (give yourself a sincere and honest mark from 0 to 10)
- Finding and being involved in meaningful and fulfilling work?
- Finding and living with suitable spouse partner?
- Building and nurturing a successful, healthy relationship with your significant other?
- Having and raising your children?
- Building and maintaining a close relationship with your parents?
- Building and maintaining a close relationship with your siblings and other family members?
- Developing close friendships?
- Overseeing and stewarding your finances?
- Living up to your full intellectual potential?
- Nurturing and developing your spiritual potential (this might differ according to religious and moral believes)?
- Dealing with your fears?
- Finding wisdom?
- Being in a good physical shape and taking care of your health?
- Taking care of your emotional well-being?
- Being of service to others and helping them?
- Being at one with yourself?
- Accepting your limitations?
- Coming to terms with aging and your own mortality (and the mortality of the close ones) ?
- Everyone at birth is “dealt a hand”, rate the quality of the “hand” you were dealt?
- Rate yourself on how well you believe you have achieved, given the hand you were dealt?
If you have an overall score of less than 100 you need to work harder and rethink many things in your life. Reconsider your big choices, and review your decisions. I am satisfied when my score is over 130. It is actually difficult to do good in all the considered areas.
Then you need to asses each mark individually. Try to focus on the questions with marks lower than 5 (or even 6 if like me your ambitious and demanding).
Now you have to decide what are you going to do to improve how well are you doing in this particular area? How are you going to achieve this improvement? How long should this take you? Next time you answer again to these questions weigh how good did you do according to your plans to progress in your “weak” areas. Consider if you at least kept a same level of self-confidence and satisfaction in all the considered areas. As said earlier, I’m taking this as a routine to ponder and review my life and decide what actions have to be taken (how and when too).
All the considered areas (questions) used to evaluate your “Success & well-being” are mainly based on five fundamental components that are
- Connecting with people
- Being active and productive (physically and mentally)
- Being curious, being aware of the world around us and taking notice
- Keeping the learning flame alive
- Giving emotionally and materially to people around you.
These were defined since few years now as the 5 Ways to Well-being by the new economics foundation (NEF).
Do you have a way to measure your success? Feel free to share it and to discuss with me either here or on Twitter: @khaled_ouanes.
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Posted on March 26, 2013 - by Khaled
A collection of motivational Digital Post-its
I hope those will be useful 
Follow me on Twitter!
Posted on March 12, 2013 - by Khaled
The Perfect WorkSpace
Few days ago, I read and saw the posts on Linkedin Today about “where I work?“. It is a sort of showcase to share with professionals using Linkedin the 50+ Places Where Big Ideas Are Born. In this collection, some of the most important online influencers share the secrets of their working spaces, offices etc… And what was obvious is that “Sometimes the best work happens while walking, broadcasting, flying and even on the beach”.
For me, the conclusions to draw from these posts is that the “Perfect Workspace” has no clear definition. It is a personal quest. For some it has to be a big office in a large room, for others it is a table in a coffee shop, sometimes it is a standing desk or even a stool and a laptop in your garden. The most important thing is to be at your ease and in the mood to produce great work and to come up with bright innovative ideas. This mainly depends on your habits, the nature of your work and the tools you use to be productive and to be inspired.
Our work space choice can tell much about us. This is interesting to consider especially if this work space makes you feel at the top of your productivity. However, we all continue to fine-tune and evolve our settings and tools in order to become even more inspired, creative and productive.
Since few years now, we are witnessing changes and new trends in how we manage businesses nowadays. This is obvious from the posts in the “Where I work” series from Linkedin. The clearest tendencies show that the traditional work spaces and offices are less and less used and preferred. The displayed work spaces evidently mirror important evolution in our way to conceive modern business and offices. Modern concepts are geared towards increasing flexibility and fluidity and witness of a constant effort to achieve better communication and more openness. This is really enhanced and catalyzed by the technological advances in devices and mobile networks, wireless internet speed and the greater accessibility to productive software everywhere (thanks to the cloud and other advances). Portability is no longer a wild dream! Traditional offices are still used but they are evolving too.
We see more and more outdoors desks, “mobile offices” and standing/walking working options.
Some prefer a basic frugal work space; others can’t perform well unless they customize their work space with photos, souvenirs and personal belongings.
My advice is to find out the best work space set up that allows you perform at your best and be productive, creative and inspired. Then you can try to fine-tune it and bring in a considerable deal of innovation, flexibility and portability. Remember, your work space tells a lot about who you really are! I could even say “Show me where you work and I will tell you how you work!”
If you like the article bookmark it and digg it! Don’t forget to subscribe via RSS or E-mail. Or just follow me on Twitter!
Posted on May 10, 2012 - by Khaled
What Your First Car Should Be
I think that everyones first car should be a Nissan since it handles so well and it easy to afford and maintain. Many Nissans are available for purchase at your local riverside nissan and puente hills nissan dealerships. Tons of employees are available to help you find the exact car you’re looking for.
Try the West Covina dealership as well. Both offer great customer service and a wonderful selection of different Nissan models. No matter what you want, may it be a new Nissan Altima or an older version of the Nissan Cube, they’ve got you covered! As dealerships they know exactly what consumers are looking for when it comes to cars. They that you want both a great looking and great running car at an affordable price. They know that you expect outstanding customer service, and they know that you desire specials and deals all year round to help you afford care for your car. They keep all of this in mind while maintaining their business and paying their employees. The consumer is the most important part of any business, and so as all other car dealerships (and businesses) go, they really do work to satisfy you. If you walk into a car dealership with absolutely no clue as to what kind of car you want, the people who work there are trained to help you out.
They will listen to your needs and tell you the best fit for not only your personality, but your financial situation as well. They aren’t going to push a 50K car on you if they know you can’t afford to go over 10K. They really do try to be both sensitive and helpful at the same time. Take their suggestions into consideration because you never know when they might have picked out the exact car that is right for you (and you may have never even heard about it!). Nissan car dealerships are constantly working to offer you the best selection of Nissan models and customer service. Going to L.A or Riverside for your next Nissan purchase is a great idea. If you are new to owning a car, I highly suggest trusting in a Nissan. Both the dealerships and the cars will be very good to you.
Posted on March 2, 2009 - by Khaled
Launching TwittHero
TwittHero is a new web site that will be publishing weekly face/offs between rock star twitterers along with news and articles about Twitter. From time to time I will try to have an interview with a rock star twitterer. The first face off will be launched in few minutes. Go ahead and visit TwittHero.
Posted on January 20, 2009 - by Khaled
I Love Wildlife
I Love Wild life! Yes I do. And when we love something we try as hard as we can to protect it. Wild life is endangered! This no news for you! Many animal and vegetal species are becoming more and more rare! threatened by anthropological activities. Global warming is a sad truth with fatal effects. I thought why not openly and clearly show -as web designers, developers, programmers, graphic designers…- our support and love to Wild life worldwide? why not display a small graphic on our blogs, web sites to attest this love? to say that we care! That we tr to shut down our computers when we don’t need them! And that we don’t print documents unless it is necessary!
I created some graphics that you can freely post on your blogs and web sites to join this campaign and spread the word. You can also create your own graphics and it will be nice to post the links here in the comments! If you are interested in how I created those graphics then they are mostly based on sxc.hu stock photos with some tweaks and adjustments with Photoshop. For the frogs there’s a tutorial here about how I created them.
I would also like to post a link towards an incredible nature and wild life photography site : http://luislouro.com. Luis Louro is such a great photographer! just browse his galleries and slideshows and you will be truly and genuinely fascinated by the beauty of Wild animals and vegetation. As you probably know too I am also a scientist I had the chance to see many animal and vegetal species in the wild in Africa and Europe and I can only say that such encounters are fascinating and life-changing! Especially african fauna is incredible. Diving allows you to see marvellous things. I hope everyone will have the chance to witness this beauty! And most importantly to preserve it for our children and grandchildren!
If you need other graphics sizes just let me know!
Posted on January 7, 2009 - by Khaled
Donuts!
Donuts… Who doesn’t like them? They are delicious, easy to prepare and you may eat them basically anytime of the day! You can eat them while working etc… There are so many different recipes for doughnuts but one of my favorites is chocolate donuts!
For this recipe (~30 donuts) you will need:
- 1 fresh egg
- 3 ½ cups of flour
- 1 cup of sugar
- 5-7 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 cup mashed potatoes
- 75-100g of bitter chocolate
- 2/3 cup semi-skimmed milk
- fat for deep frying
Beat egg until they become homogeneous and light and add the sugar and continue beating. Melt the chocolate in a bain-marie (hot water bath) and add it to the sugar eggs mixture. Add the mashed potatoes and the milk.
Add baking powder and salt to the flour and bake till. Wrap the dough in plastic and cool it in the fridge for 2 hours. Then roll it out on a floured surface. Cut with floured doughnut cutter. Fry, turning each donut once, in deep fat at about 350° until the donuts become golden colored. Transfer to paper towels to drain.
You may want to dip it in melted chocolate or even some honey.
That’s it! I hope you will enjoy it!
Posted on January 6, 2009 - by Khaled
WebScienceMan is here!
WebScienceMan is plugged and running
After a few years of running this blog under the name of No Relation, I decided a while ago to Change the name along with a full redesign (which did not happen since almost two years). So now this blog is running under the name of “WebScienceMan”. This change was discretely announced before! Read the about page to have a better idea about the motives.
REVAMPING PROCESS
During this revamping process the CMS was upgraded to WordPress 2.7 (this was very smooth and I really love the new features of this version). I also created a new graphic design that dubbed “The Rainbow Cliff theme”. I’ve laid this graphic over the structure provided by Paper C theme (which was a gift from a friend of mine) after retouching some HTML, CSS, PHP and JS. New Plug-ins were installed among which I will mention:
So you may have understood that from now on there will be polls and surveys carried on so don’t dither to come back, check and vote.
ADVERTISING
From now on you can purchase an advertising spot on WebScienceMan to advertise your products, your services, your site or whatever. Find out the details here.
Posted on December 31, 2008 - by Khaled
Happy new year 2009!
Happy end for 2008! I hope that 2009 will be excellent for all of you and better than 2008. I want also to remind you that changes will occur here soon. So see you next year (that’s merely in few hours from now!) I’d better go now to prepare myself for the dinner out in this new Italian restaurant…
Posted on December 27, 2008 - by Khaled
Revamping, refurbishing and renaming
I decided to revamp and rename my blog. It’s time to do so and to focus a little bit more on it. I will probably be able to have more time to blog more effectively! I will keep writing and posting about the same things I used to. But starting from the beginning of 2009 this blog won’t no longer be called “No relation”! and the CMS will be updated to WordPress 2.7. I will have a new theme too and some more cool stuff!
May be the above graphic will give you some clue about the future directions of this blog! So stay tuned!
And if you have any comments or inputs don’t dither to share them with me!
Posted on December 26, 2008 - by Khaled
Café du Jour: Café Glacé
Un tout petit monde in april 2008, originally uploaded by pirlouiiiit.
As I am a huge fan of coffee and of food in general I decided to start blogging about some recipes that can really be called as geeky recipes. Everyone knows that most of the Graphic / Web designers/ developers are fond of caffeine that keeps them awake during the cold long nights while they are brainstorming, cogitating, designing, drawing, coding, programming, photoshoping, or just stuck out in front of a blank screen searching for inspiration!
I’ll try to share with you my love for the tasty coffee recipes that I come up with or the ones I’ve learned to prepare!
The recipe I am going to blog about today is one among many frozen coffee recipes. I like frozen coffee or café glace even in the winter, that cold sensation travelling down my mouth and esophagus energize me with a boost of stamina! Let alone the taste, the smoothness and… Of course, the caffeine! I like to call this one Vanilla café frappé..
So you are going to need:
- 1 liter of hot strong black nicely roasted coffee
- 4-6 table spoons of Sugar
- 1/8 liter light milk cream (10%)
- 1/4 liter of vanilla cream
- 6-8 ice cubes
Preparation:
Pour the hot coffee in a bowl add the sugar, stir it up and let it cool down. Then transfer it to the blender, add the milk and vanilla creams and mix it till it is homogeneous. Add the ice cubes and mix again with short pulses at first. Once the Ice cubes are crushed we’re done!
Pour in a pitcher and put it in the fridge for an hour or so and don’t forget to stir it up from time to time.
After an hour it is ready! Pour some in your favorite mug/ glass add 3 or 4 ice cubes and drink!
This will be enough for a full day (3 to 4 glasses)…
I hope you will enjoy it !
Posted on December 17, 2008 - by Khaled
From now on you can follow me on twitter! Yep finally I am joining the vibe!
Posted on April 8, 2008 - by Khaled
1on40.com: suspended?
A short time after my first blog post about 1on40 entitled 1on40: does it really get you to be number 1 in google? I am again writing about this “miraculous” SEO service. I tried to check their site today and it was suspended. All I saw was a suspended account from PowWeb hosting. I thought “was it due to illegal activities? was it reported as scam?”… Then few minutes later the 1on40 site came back! so it was probably due to unpaid hosting bill? not very professional in my opinion. Anyway, almost 15 days after I’ve submitted that old site of mine I am not noticing any changes yet. We’re not close to the end of the announced 120 days though…
To be continued…
Posted on March 30, 2008 - by Khaled
Smooth and fast upgrade to WordPress 2.5
Upgrading to the new version of WordPress (2.5) was easy and smooth and without hassles or problems of any kind. I’m also loving the new administration interface and all in all I’m very pleased with it. WordPress is now more flexible customizable and extensible and yet easier to use. The design of the new customizable dashboard is just lovely… In fact this new version was designed by Jeffry Zeldman’s Happy Cog (and of course built by Automattic). Definitely a milestone is reached with this version. Everyday I’m more and more convinced that WordPress is the best blogging option around! At least this is true for me and for many others (did you know that WordPress powers around 0.8% of the whole web?).
More info here.
Posted on August 22, 2007 - by Khaled
I’m Here
Hey guys! This is just to let you know I’m still here… I’ve just came back from summer vacations in Sicily! and that I’m really busy doing a lot of stuff here and there… I hope I’ll start blogging here some time soon… Stay tuned and BTW thanks for everyone who contacted me to ask about my absence…I really appreciated that…
Posted on March 24, 2007 - by Khaled
Promotion to Design Team Advisor at SitePoint
After being a Design team Mentor at SitePoint for the last 9 months I was promoted yesterday to the position of Design Team Advisor.
And of course I have a new shiny badge:
The anouncement thread can be read here.
This is a huge honor for me to be an Advisor in the biggest Web designers and developers community on the net! if you don’t know about SitePoint yet then you’re missing a huge thing! SitePoint has more than 166,790 members from all over the world! If you want to know more about SitePoint then look here.
Posted on December 19, 2006 - by Khaled
BreedSoftware: Beta launch
Today we’re launching our new project called BreedSoftware. The company specializes in developing software and games for the Microsoft Windows platform (not only the desktop Windows platform but also the Windows Mobile platform for Pocket PCs). Currently, BreedSoftware markets various products ranging from website development utilities to intellectual games. BreedSoftware is committed to provide high-performance, and cost effective software products such as text editors, PHP editors as well as high-quality games for our customers.
Visit the website.
Posted on December 7, 2006 - by Khaled
My FireFox Add-ons
I was asked so many times about the add-ons fro Mozilla FireFox I am using. I’ve always given different variable answers due to the fact I was actually shifting from an add-on to another or dropping some they no longer work on the newer Firefox versions (like screengrab for instance). For now I think I have a nice collection of add-ons to use with my Firefox 2.0 installation. So here’s the full list:
| 1. | CSSViewer{1.0.2} | |
| 2. | Codetch{0.4.0.20061026} | |
| 3. | ColorZilla{0.8.3.1} | |
| 4. | Fasterfox{2.0.0} | |
| 5. | FaviconizeTab{0.9.7.1} | |
| 6. | FireFTP{0.94.6} | |
| 7. | Firebug{1.0b2} | |
| 8. | FirefoxExtensionBackupExtensionFEBE{4.0.4} | |
| 9. | FoxyTunes{2.0.4} | |
| 10. | SaveAsImage{1.042} | |
| 11. | TabMixPlus{0.3.5.2} | |
| 12. | TotalValidator{3.3.1} | |
| 13. | WebDeveloper{1.0.2} | |
| 14. | blueorganizer{2.7.1} |
I will update the list once I have some changes in it. See the pic on flickr! Enjoy these great FireFox plug-ins.
Posted on December 6, 2006 - by Khaled
Pink’d!
Well I’ve tweaked the look of the blog’s theme. It is obvious, I’ve added a touch of pink. Pink seems to be a color that’s widely used in the modern Web 2.0ish sites and web applications. So why not a touch of pink in ‘No relation’? Moreover Pink looks nice, trendy and slick with lime green… So I took the plunge and tweaked my CSS and my graphics.
Something else that’s new on ‘No relation’ is that I’ve added a “current project” box to the sidebar, this is powered by the lightbox JS V2. Nifty! Also this we’ll let see what I am working on right now, and for the moment it is BreedSoftware Project. BreedSoftware will hopefully be launched within few days.
I’ve also added a Flickr powered Photo gallery to the blog in which you will find some personal pics, some Photo Manipulations with Photoshop (old Dark Art for the 2003 and 2004 year) and some old Projects that I had the permission to post publicly unlike most of the others.
So that’s all! I hope you like the changes…
Posted on December 5, 2006 - by Khaled
Oh! I look like some celebrities!
Believe it or not I do look like some of most famous persons on earth! it seems that we have some common heritage! It seems like I am a mix of Che Guevara, Megan Ewing, Laureen Hill and Adriana Karembeu… You don’t believe me? you are a click away from the truth just click for (more…)
Posted on December 5, 2006 - by Khaled
Photoshop Tutorials Series
Upon some demand from some friends and users I will start posting some of my old Adobe Photoshop tutorials here on this blog. I will also post new Photoshop tutorials soon. The Old tutorials were already published on Kyscorp, good-tutorials.com and SitePoint forums and many other Photoshop tutorials sites. I am gathering them again here. Most of them are for beginners. Stay tuned guys!
Posted on December 3, 2006 - by Khaled
How The Mozilla Mascot was born?
Today, while browsing the net as usual I’ve stumbled on this article written by the famous illustrator Dave Titus. This article was written back in December 2002 and explains the history of the original mozilla mascot creation since 1994, that green fella dinosaur looks really more friendly than the red Tyrannosaur Rex mascot/icon used today by Mozilla…
Also don’t forget to take a look at the work of Dave Titus here! it is just awesome.
Posted on December 2, 2006 - by Khaled
No relation Blog as a tag graph
Thanks to this little Java Applet , the HTML Graph Applet, devoloped by Sala you can view any website as a tag graph. For instance this is the tag graph for my blog. This a Java Applet so you need to have the Java plug-in installed, also it may take some time to load. Go ahead try it!
Posted on August 14, 2006 - by Khaled
SitePoint’s Official Photo Manipulation Tournament
Today was the big day to launch the SitePoint’s Official Photo Manipulation Tournament.
This will be “a massive, multi-round competition in which entrants will need to show off their photo manipulation skills in order to win fame and prizes.” So you have some talent, join in and show us.
Read the Announcement Thread for more info and details. Take a look at the Entry Thread too, some nice stuff is already there!
The Winner will have a very nice Prize including:
- 1 copy of SP’s Book Build Your Own Website The Right Way With HTML & CSS
- 20 Marketplace credits
- 1 SitePoint T-Shirt
- 1 copy of the brand new SP Book Photoshop Anthology (coming soon!)
So Join SitePoint right now and enter this awesome contest!
Posted on July 13, 2006 - by Khaled
Software Programming Process
This kind of things are more and more commun!
